


stainache

by Legendaerie



Category: Red vs. Blue
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Business Trip, Domestic Fluff, F/M, Reunion Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-07
Updated: 2017-05-07
Packaged: 2018-10-29 02:41:07
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,184
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10844796
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Legendaerie/pseuds/Legendaerie
Summary: It's only beenthree weeks.





	stainache

**Author's Note:**

> originally posted a sampling on tumblr, then decided to add some sex. you're welcome.

The trip doesn’t seem over until Carolina feels the bump of the landing gear on the runway; bracing herself as the plane jolts, trying to slow its momentum as it races across the ground. Familiar soil rolls under the wheels and with it comes a sense of finality. One more life event over. A brief break and then on to the next.

Carolina waits, hunched over, to exit her seat; waits at the baggage claim for her silver suitcase with the scuffed corners to appear; waits at the bus stop for the shuttle and waits for everything to fall back into place. She’s empty, drifting between identities of the steely professional and the redhead who wears the same hoodie every trip to the corner store, tossed around by mass transport and wheeling her suitcase three blocks to their house.

Sharing spaces felt impossible, at first. Her childhood home had been large, each person isolated to their own room with their own hobbies. In contrast, her flat is a matchbook and her boyfriend an octopus, invested in her life as much as his own. Sleeping together - spending the night after an especially thorough fuck - had been it’s own challenge, but like everything else about their relationship, they’d figured it out.

The house is empty and dark; Carolina flips on the light in the kitchen and listens. Nothing but the distant burble of the fish tank in the living room, the soft rush of a car passing by. She plods upstairs to grab her extra charger, plugs her phone in next to the coffee maker, and measures out enough grounds for two.

So focused on her task - on trying to feel more like Carolina Who Always Checks Her Egg Cartons And Pokes Her Steaks and less like Ms. Church The Terrifying Representative of Lancer - she doesn’t notice the headlights pull haphazardly into the drive before it’s too late. Her heart jumps into her throat, but it’s nothing like first date jitters of bubbling hormones and self-conscious affection. It’s anticipation, yes, but harmonizing with an assurance that a missing piece is about to snap into place.

Her name is on York’s lips when he opens the door, still in his clothes from work (she hates the color on him, it tints his eyes green to look too much like hers, her father’s, her brother’s) and she has two thoughts at once;

 _I need to put this coffee down or I’m going to spill it all over him,_ and,

_I’m home._

Carolina does the first and is working on saying the second when York shoves her up against the counters, mouth already on hers and swallowing her syllables in desperate kisses. His hands are everywhere - the back of her neck, the base of her spine, her hips, her shoulders and cupping her jaw like he’s trying to make up for three weeks of missed affection all at once. And she doesn’t disapprove, either, wrapping her arms around his neck and letting herself lean against him, jet-lagged and sore from little over half a day spent in the air.

“Couch,” she says. “Also, coffee?”

“It’s too late for coffee?” York asks against the side of her neck, having relocated his kisses to allow her to speak. His mouth makes her tingle, clean and sparkling like ginger ale, while his body heat chases away the memory of the Sidewinder climate.

“You’re supposed to stay awake when you're, uh,” she fumbles for words as her hands somehow find themselves up York’s polo shirt, and he flinches at their chill. Oops. “When you’re changing timezones.”

“Okay, or I could just wear you out with, like, five orgasms and get you to sleep for fourteen hours. Wanna try that?”

Carolina hums as she scratches his back, feeling him groan against her shoulder before he pulls away to look at her. He looks the same as how she’d left him, one eye night sky blue and the other pearlescent with cataract. They’d met the same night he’d lost part of his vision; a drunken college fight with someone’s ex boyfriend had sent him flying into her, and afterwards she’d held napkins to his bleeding face while he rambled about video games through the shock.

“What?” she asks, after a beat. “Do I look different?” God, she hopes not; the persona she wears at work is one she’s never liked, Novocaine to her true emotions. If that emptiness were to bleed into the rest of her life, she’s not sure she could stand it.

“I missed you,” he says simply, planting a chaste kiss at the corner of her mouth like he can’t help it. “Glad you’re home.”

“I’m glad, too. But I can’t waste this coffee. It’s the last of the snickerdoodle flavor.”

York blinks. “I thought we were already out?”

“I hid some before my trip so it’d be there when I got back.”

“God, I missed you,” he repeats, and kisses her again so deeply and passionately that when he stops, she’s too dazed to notice him take both cups and sprint off.

In sock feet, with plane-cramped legs and a late start, Carolina just barely beats him to the couch.

 

* * *

 

Five hours (and a couple orgasms later) she wakes up to realize her plan has failed. It’s a little shy of four in the morning and she’s wide awake, too trained by her alarm for the past three weeks to go back to sleep now, tempting as it is. The intoxicating heat of York’s body is at her back, one of his arms thrown loosely over her waist. It wasn’t there when she first passed out; York never does it while awake, aware of how disruptive touch can be when she’s trying to fall asleep, but once he’s out he tends to spoon.

What’s odd is that she didn’t feel him do it. Usually there’s a half-second of wakefulness when he wraps her arm around her, nuzzles her shoulder, or hooks an ankle around hers. A little blip on her radar, a brief moment of awareness before she accepts the intrusion and falls back asleep. Now she has no idea how long they’ve been like this, with York’s steady breath on the back of her shirt, their legs entwined.

She loves him. Not an unusual revelation; it’s a thought she’s had a hundred times since they first met, each one resonating through her. But this one stings, intensifies on the return. She loves him. She missed him.

Carolina laces her fingers with his and guides his hand up to her chest, clamping it over her pounding heart and clutching an invisible wound. If these thoughts are like the sounds of bells, this is a sonorous tone of warning, a ship’s bell as it starts to go down. She loves him. She missed him. She doesn’t want to travel without him, but she will.

Her breathing starts to quicken, familiar shadows of a familiar room blurring. She will love him, and she will leave him, again and again. How many more times will he still be here, waiting for her to return?

The feeling of lips on the nape of her neck makes her jolt; once more, York has caught her off guard. “Dreams?”

God, she hopes not; but in the haze of traveling so much, Carolina’s grip on reality is rather tenuous. She reaches out, flips on the bedside lamp on the third try, and turns to face her boyfriend. He can’t be bothered to sit up, he’s wearing a terrible Kiss Me I’m Irish shirt he bought at Target while they were both dizzy-drunk in mid April, his hair is a mess and Carolina is horribly, sickeningly sure she’s never been more in love with someone in her life.

So she rolls him onto his back, straddles his hips, and kisses him until the alarms in her heart fall silent and let her have this moment, this early hour, the sweet noises she draws out of him and the way his hands skate across her sleep warmed skin with reverence.

“It’s four in the morning,” he laments when she rears back to yank her shirt off (a Halo tee she remembers she bought on the same trip, snagged from the young men’s section and flatteringly tight across her chest) “not so fast.”

“Lazy bastard,” she taunts, knowing his complaints are hollow. He cracks one eye open and pats the pillow beside his head.

He waits until she’s naked, knees framing his face, before he mutters “you know you love me” and yanks her hips down flush with his mouth.

She does. That’s the problem. But it’s easy to drown her fears in waves of sensation, savoring the rhythm of York’s tongue against her clit. Easy to fall into the pattern of riding his face, resting her forehead against the wall and sinking her fingers into his hair. Easy to come, just from this alone. He knows what he’s doing, light consistent strokes on the most sensitive places, breaching her occasionally with his tongue. His hands on her hips are anchors, sliding up to her waist to comfort and down to her thighs to tease. But he stops before she can come.

A double tap on her ribs and Carolina moves to the side on shaking legs while York sits up. His mouth is slick and wet in the lamplight, and the way he licks his lips is nothing short of obscene.

“Still think I’m lazy?” he grins, gathering up pillows and blankets and shoving them to the head of the bed. Too smug about the whole thing, so Carolina pins him to his half-finished nest and grinds down, smooth and purposeful. He’s too dressed for her purposes, so she pulls off his shirt when he chases her mouth and tosses it to the far side of the room.

York’s eyes are heavy, traveling up and down her naked body as she rocks above him, his teeth worrying his lower lip.

“Gonna fall asleep?” Carolina asks, pulling her hair back off her neck and letting it cascade back down in a sweaty, tangled mess. She hasn’t showered since the hotel in Sidewinder (a horribly small little thing with the worst spray she’d ever seen. The picture she’d sent to York had a sepia-toned look; he’d called it ‘a true golden shower’ and the next five texts he’d sent she replied with ‘BLOCKED’) and the look he gives her is nothing short of worshipful.

Until he makes a face at her joke and says back, tartly if a little breathy, “first of all, I was getting all these pillows for a reason, second, it’s _four_ in the _morning_.”

At that she lets him up, lets him finish his project unmolested and settles, naked, in a sitting position. Waits for him to roll the condom on, even, and continues to sit prim on the corner of the mattress until he breaks and starts to crawl over to her.

“Hey, I’m sorry, it’s not your fault you gotta travel so much, I didn’t--”

Carolina kisses him, coaxes him backwards to his little indent in the bedding, wraps her hand around the shaft of his cock and eases the head inside of her. York makes a choked noise in her mouth, or maybe the sound comes from her; either way the sentiment is the same, an almost painful moment of burning need and broken vulnerability both.

It’s as though even her body had missed him, taking him to the base in a third of the usual time, her legs clamped around his hips and fingernails digging into his shoulder from the shock. Below her, his arms wrapped around her ribs, York makes a noise like she’d knocked the wind out of him. If she had, it wouldn’t be the first time. New Years, two years ago, a drunken piledrive into Connie’s beanbag that had nearly split it in two.

She feels the same; too full, too fast, and breathless as she gets her legs back under her. York crushes her against his chest.

“Oh, god,” he groans against her collarbone, “oh fuck.” His grip tightens on her back, and he tucks his chin over her shoulder. They’re so close, too close for her to move, but he doesn’t seem to care.

“You didn’t come already, just from that?” she asks, trying to sound cocky.

“No, just-- just give me a second,” and his voice sounds distinctly wet and something in her seems to break at the realization that they’re the same. The way he clings to her, the way his gasps sound more like sobs; that’s how she pretends not to feel. A childish notion that if she ignores it, it’ll go away on its own but it can’t. Not when York is an echo, the hopeful clamor from shore, the beacon guiding her home.

“Okay,” Carolina says, half-muffled by the pillows at his back, “I can give you that.”

His hands run up and down her spine, nose buried in her hair as he tries to steady his breathing. She can feel it puff against her neck, hitch against her chest, and she rolls her hips to hear him choke. She pulls back to kiss him and there’s a tear in the corner of his bad eye, threatening to fall, and she refuses to cry, she will not, she is hard and cold and such a badass that--

“I missed you so much,” York says, and now Carolina wishes she’d turned the lamp off because it aches to look at him. Aches to have not seen him for three weeks, a single grain in the hourglass of their lives and yet it affected them this much. They’re fucked. Well and truly fucked.

“Me too,” she admits, distracting him with kisses immediately after but she knows he heard her. She can feel it in his hands as he cradles her face in the kiss, can taste it sweet in his mouth and saline on his skin when she moves to his cheek. She can hear it in the way he breathes her name like a prayer, trailing his lips along her collarbone and neck. He knows. He knows her.

His hands settle on her hips, coaxing her to move on him. Carolina rises up on her knees and drops back down on him, savoring his breathless “ah, ah _shit_ ” when she does it again. York has never held back during sex, and it's something she's missed when getting herself off alone; the silence in her hotel room felt so heavy without his voice in her ear telling her how good she feels, how much he adores her. She'd almost called him for phone sex once, before she remembered the time difference and that he’d be sound asleep.

Not that it had stopped her this time.

As she rides York, pinning his shoulders to the pillows and reveling in his groan at her dominance, Carolina can't really bring herself to care. It's good, satisfying in a base way, even as she starts to feel the sweat on her skin and the slippery mess between her thighs. She’ll need a shower. Maybe she can have him join her for a bath.

His hands are on her hips, helping her keep a steady pace, his thumbs rubbing circles into her hip bones. His eyes never seem to stay on one part of her for long; down to where their bodies meet, up her heaving, bouncing chest and to her face, holding her gaze with such an intensity Carolina wants to look away.

“Marry me,” he says. Carolina nearly stops from shock, heart tripping in her chest. But she's close, so close, thighs trembling and threatening to lock around his hips, that she's too distracted to reply other than to be pulled down for another kiss.

“I think I'll need to hear that when it's not four in the morning,” she stammers after she comes up for air. She can't stay away for long, though, and feels the familiar white-hot burn of orgasm curling in her stomach. York is close, too - he has to be, with how he’s shuddering underneath her, practically clawing at her to pull her down against his chest. Just a few more short, deep strokes and rolls of her hips and Carolina is gone, pressing her forehead to York's shoulder as she tightens around him in waves, jolting with the force of her orgasm as it shorts out her senses.

Her head spins when York rolls her over, their bodies still connected, and fucks her through the aftershocks. His kisses are mostly tongue and teeth, and he hikes one of her legs high against his ribs. It's just on the side of too much so Carolina sinks her fingernails into his back and leaves furrows up his spine, and York falls to pieces under her touch. Her name shatters in his mouth as his body goes rigid under her hands, between her thighs, against her chest.

He drops the full weight of his body on her when his limbs go lax; Carolina can feel his grin against her shoulder and she pets the hair at the nape of his neck, basking in the afterglow. She's going to have to get up in a couple minutes, stumble over to the bathroom get cleaned up, but for once in three weeks she doesn't have to get up. She can lay here, and let her boyfriend give her a smug little kiss on the top of her shoulder, and no one can stop her. No planes to catch, no meetings to attend. Just another morning with York to spend how they please.

“Is four thirty too late for a bubble bath?” she asks, yanking on his hair to get his attention. The sound York makes is rough, sweet and satisfied.

“You do you, sweetheart, but I’m going back to sleep.”

 

* * *

 

She showers quick and alone and wakes to an idyllic morning, golden sunlight stripes on the mattress breaking over the horizon of her hips and shoulders, and no hand across her waist. There’s a weight behind her, a subdued warmth and damning evidence that she’s too attuned to sleeping with York, and as she lays still he hears the tap of fingers against a screen. Reading in bed, again. Unwilling to leave her side.

Carolina rolls onto her side and shoves her face against York’s shoulder, jolting his arm. “I thought we were going to get black-out curtains.”

“We were, but last night _somebody_ was determined to wake up on time. Welcome to eight forty am, baby,” York says in his TV personality voice, all zest and humor. She raises herself on an elbow, pulls out her pillow, and hits him in the stomach with it. His grunt of pain is entirely for show, and followed by him pinning her to the bed with his entire body. “Ooooh, aren't you nice and toasty?”

“Get off of me,” Carolina says, and doesn't mean a word of it. York flips them anyway, trying to haul her onto his stomach and failing with a hiss as her thigh collides roughly with his junk. “Serves you right.”

“The hubris of man,” York wheezes under her, shifting until they're both in a somewhat comfortable position. Still half-awake, Carolina closes her eyes and bites his earlobe just to be a dick about it all.

“I hate jet lag.”

“Yeah, but I made cinnamon rolls, so I hope that helps.”

Her eyes snap open. Carolina props herself up on her elbows and locks eyes with him. “What kind?”

“The from scratch ones. I got the bread machine going while you were in the shower last night.” York bumps his nose with hers. “Should be done in ten minutes. Am I the greatest boyfriend, or what?”

“Careful with that ego, or it might get as big as--”

“Yours?”

Carolina slithers down his body, avoiding his kiss with her morning breath and snapping the waistband of his boxers against his hips. “I had other comparisons in mind,” she says coyly, and giving head is worth the look on his face in this moment alone. “And good ways to fill ten minutes.”

She doesn’t _enjoy_ giving oral, not without a condom - call her selfish, but the taste of come has never appealed to her - but today is a day of exceptions and she takes him into her mouth half-hard and bare. He gives a sharp, surprised noise, hands slapping to the sheets and fingers curling, already shaking.

“Oh,” he gasps, and she pins his hips down to the mattress with her free hand, licking the palm of the other and using it to stroke his shaft. “Oh fuck, Carolina it’s--”

She hums, cheerfully, lips rolled over her teeth and the head of his cock brushing her hard palate. The vibrations kill him, every time, and it’s hard not to laugh at how his body goes stiff as a board, trying desperately to stay still. His hips rock up against her grip, fighting through his own will and forcing her a little deeper on him; Carolina pulls off and coughs.

“Sorry sorry sorry, I’m so sorry,” York says in a rush, hands snapping off the bed to cup her face, rub the muscles in her jaw. “You’re amazing, I love you, I didn’t mean to--”

“It’s fine.” She exhales on his cock, watches it twitch and form a bead of precum at the end that she wipes with her hand. “I know it’s been a while.”

A glance at the clock to check her time as she traces the slit with the tip of her tongue and then she takes him in again. It’s easier to ignore the taste when she focuses on the rest of York’s body, and how every nerve and tendon, every ounce of his awareness is entirely at her mercy. One of his hands is still on her face, shakily curling her bangs around his fingers, as the other tries to claw holes in their navy striped sheets. The whole scene is such a picture, sunlight glowing golden-green off his terrible shirt and striping the far wall; she locks it all to memory as she doubles her efforts, pulling off in time to catch his release in her hand and smother his cry of her name in a kiss.

Carolina cleans up with a handful of tissues as York tries to catch his breath, running a hand through his hair and messing it up even further. “Do I need to call into work today and stay home?” he asks, watching her come back to bed.

“I don’t know. Can you even walk?”

“Nope.” He closes his eyes, drapes the back of one arm over them. “Give me a minute.”

“You have two. Or however long until the cinnamon rolls are done.” Carolina makes to leave but York’s hand catches the hem of her shirt, pulling gently until she’s laying down beside him. This time, he wastes no time in tangling their legs and tucking his head under her chin.

His hair tickles her jawline, and is damp at the roots from sweat. “That’s fair,” he concedes, slipping a hand up her shirt to cradle the small of her back, and when the timer goes off it’s only the fear of burning breakfast that gets them to move.

 

* * *

 

They're out of the good coffee, so Carolina goes with orange juice instead. It always horrifies York, imagining drinking that after something as sweet as cinnamon rolls, but today he doesn't say anything about it. Just tears open a new box of black tea and drops a bag in his mug, tag dangling over the side.

“I meant it, you know.”

His face is serious, approaching grim.  Carolina pauses, third cinnamon roll unraveled on her plate and a curl of pastry on her fork. Part of her wants to ruin the moment and ask if she sucked all the fun out of him, but she holds back. “What?”

“I’d like to marry you, one day.” York swallows, but holds her gaze. “If you wanted.”

She's thought about it a handful of times in the abstract, when a relationship started to get serious; including hers with York. But that errant thought had been almost two years back, and when she goes to dismiss it it sticks to her hand like tape.

The rest of her life, like this.

“Is that a proposal?” she asks, her stomach dropping out from under her. York forces a laugh.

“No, no, no. God. I don't even have a ring on me.” He bites his lip and looks at his plate. “Guess I could have baked one into a roll here, but,” and he addresses her again, “I just wanted to put that on the table.”

“Marriage.”

“Yeah.”

Carolina takes a sip of her orange juice, and the glass shakes so much it clicks against her bottom teeth. “I'll keep that in mind,” she says at last, looking down at the coiled pastry and imagining a cinnamon-and-butter-covered diamond ring.

Might not be so bad.

  



End file.
